Improving foresight
by Anna Williams
Traditional foresight practices can be excessively top down and entrench traditional power structures. Embracing a plurality of futures means more people can have a say in producing and participating in the creation of richer, more contextualised possibilities. Here we explain foresight’s potential problems and set out an alternative.
Historically, foresight practices have emerged from the corporate world, and are heavily used for the development of technological futures. The outcome of this history is that our current understanding of the process is involved in constructing futures do not yet match the ease with which we can imagine innovations and hence produce ‘futures’. As Selin puts it:
“Grasping complexity over the long term and accounting for the ongoing myriad of interactions between values, machines and regimes has proven daunting for the social sciences.”
Selin, 2008
Foresight is a great tool, and lots of foresight happens informally, particularly through research and strategy development in various organisational sizes and sectors. For example, in civil society, it happens with less focus on technology or the movement of capital, but because it is necessary for those who operate outside of traditional power to anticipate and hold the potential of multiple futures — responding to and trying to divert the reality of the present, sometimes speaking the unspeakable, while trying to shape something new.
In order to understand why there is a power imbalance with foresight, it is first useful to outline where its limitations are, and to explain how Careful Industries are developing better ways forward, to develop the notion of plural futures.
Limitations
Exploring the process of foresight illuminates limitations. Foresight practices attempt to tackle the problem of the growing speed of development in modern societies, while addressing future uncertainty. Growing out of the work of future studies scholars such as Bell (1997), techniques like technology assessment are used by foresight practitioners to gauge the future, utilising anticipatory knowledge. The challenge here is that they mould certain outputs through fixed inputs. The linear and temporal nature of knowledge (and data) becomes apparent: it is contextual and time dependent. These techniques can falsely bring order to disorder, and in the process smooth out complexity in unfair or discriminatory ways.
An alternative framing of foresight is one of understanding stories and differing interpretations of how the world could be. In this way, foresight is used to understand,
“explicit and implicit stories…circulated to cope with future known and unknown”
Selin 2008
Tacit knowledge plays a role in creating stories using interpretive frameworks, like an ontology for experience and perception. Although such methods aim towards greater plurality, they are not without challenges. There has been some discussion of how foresight practices allow examination of these stories, and how they act to legitimise, inspire and construct emerging socio-technical futures. Delving into the process of such methods will allow us to uncover any implicit biases.
‘Future’ visions of politics, economics, technology and society, have been investigated from a number of perspectives. The range of approaches to understanding the future encompasses many of the debates that scholars of Science and Technology Studies (STS) have investigated for decades. These include debates around legitimation of knowledge and expertise, power relations and boundary work, as well as social construction of scientific knowledge and technological determinism. The term ‘sociology of the future’ has been used (e.g. Bell & Mau 1971) to describe the emerging field of study, which seeks to understand future consciousness by drawing on a range of STS and the practice of foresight.
Another emerging domain is that of speculative thought, which focuses on developing methods that begin to remove the bias seen in techniques that heavily determine the inputs and data included in foresight. However, such techniques are limited in the applicability of their work because of the difficulty in translating theoretical underpinnings into practice. This translational challenge is evident, in the difficulty of realising ‘underdetermined values’ in practice (Stengers 2010, Michael et al. 2015). It is impractical to develop speculative approaches that are completely underdetermined and oblique, since it is not possible to understand all the factors that could lead to an outcome being influenced by a pre-determined thought, action or stimulus. Such theoretical challenges need to be overcome and achieve the potential to advance methods and allow engagement with ‘issues at stake’ in society.
So there are limitations with many of the methods which are commonly used in foresight. What this highlights is a need for the use of contextual and careful pragmatism in the design and deployment of foresight. Important questions for researchers and foresight practitioners include: which voices and opinions does this process include or exclude? What questions do I want to ask about the future? How can I make the process as creative and accessible as possible? Is it possible to hold many ideas about the future at once?
Plurality
The challenge with most foresight methods is that they lead to only a narrow range of ‘projected’ futures playing out: a narrow set of ideas that fall within the centre of the ‘future cone’. This is often because they facilitate an echo chamber for a small group of people to think about a specific problem, thinking is not moved beyond the current paradigm. If we could move away from the idea that foresight techniques should narrow down from many ideas to a few, then we could open the ‘probable’ to encompass many divergent ideas about the future.
Joseph Voros’s Futures Cone. Cones of potential projects from the present in to the future, extrapolating possibilities. The projected “baseline” future has a small footprint. Probable “likely to happen” futures are close to the baseline. Plausible “could happen” futures are a larger possibility space, and possible “might happen” futures are wider still. Preposterous “impossible” futures have the widest spread. Across all of these increasingly unlikely futures is a slice of preferable futures, which would be judged valuable. All possibility spaces increase over time.
An alternative: Relational Foresight
In response to the limitations and challenges of foresight, Careful Industries has developed a foresight methodology that seeks to overcome many of the these identified problems. Our relational foresight method seeks to provide a plural approach to foresight: one that is not reductionist - it seeks to nurture many ideas about the future. It involves many voices and opinions about the future by involving lived learnt and practitioner experience through participatory exercises. It is relational - it gives a space for alternative views and opinions to come together - not for consensus building but to provide a space to hold multiple views at once.
We are championing an approach that redresses the power imbalance of who gets to think about and ultimately determine the future. We hope that this will lead to a more diverse set of ideas about the future coming to fruition because we have never experienced a time of better need for plural creative futures.
You can find out more detail about our Relational Foresight approach here.
If you would like us to work with you please contact us here.